Toward the end of Errol Morris’s compelling but
oddly unsatisfying documentary, The Fog Of War, an uncharacteristically
emotional statement is made by the movie’s only interview
subject, Robert Strange McNamara: To be in charge of a
potentially unjust and unwinnable war, he says, is “a very
difficult position for sensitive human beings to be in. And I
think I was one.” It’s an unusual admission for a
man long-reviled both as one of the chief architects of LBJ’s
escalation of the Vietnam War and as an uncongenial, arrogant
know-it-all tied to an unwavering belief in statistical analysis.
Such is the nature of Morris’s film, a tricky balancing
act between the political events that are central to McNamara’s
life and the portrait of McNamara, the carefully guarded person,
that doesn’t quite come off.

The majority of the film is constructed out of archival footage,
which places Morris in an unfamiliar position: He’s used
to creating some of the most remarkable and entrancing images
found in either documentary or narrative films. Here he’s
mostly stuck with extensive manipulation of newsreels, TV reportage,
still photos, and the like, a challenge he approaches with characteristic
vigor. Footage is slowed-down, still photographs polarized to
give the illusion of depth, and interesting pixelations found
in still portraits; he even menacingly moves over a map of combat
terrain, simulating a helicopter shot over an abstract representation.
Still, you miss the flashes of devastating visual insight that
came in earlier films, like the moment in Mr. Death when
Holocaust denier and electric chair designer Fred A. Leuchter
was shown as a small child playing obliviously in a darkened room
without seeing the context of what he was doing, or the editing
schemes which connected four seemingly disparate individuals in
Fast, Cheap And Out of Control. The one visual holdover
here is his distinctive interview style, by now perfected: Using
his own device, the Interrotron, he’s able to sit back and
project his own image at his subject, who then is able to respond
looking straight back at the image and the camera, as if talking
directly to it.

Still, a few moments of astonishing grace remain. One comes when
discussing McNamara’s time at GM, where he discovered how
important seatbelts are in reducing auto-accident casualties by
dropping skulls down stairwells: Morris replicates the falls and
crashes in slow-motion. That’s just a diversion from the
main issue, which is Vietnam. Here Morris shows us the famous
Domino Theory, the misguided foreign policy idea that the collapse
of Vietnam to communism would in turn lead to the fall of many
smaller countries to communism. He shows the fall of a row of
dominoes in slow-motion and, later, when McNamara talks about
how he knows unspecified ways by which history would have turned
out differently, he reverses the footage and has the dominoes
all stand up again, visually implicating that particular piece
of Cold War ideology as responsible for the war.

Morris leads off with the Cuban Missile Crisis, then flashes
back and takes McNamara’s career from the beginning. In
World War II, he’s positioned as the inverse image of Gen.
Curtis LeMay, the victorious commander of Strategic Air Command
who was also exactly the kind of bomb-crazy asshole parodied by
Rod Steiger in Mars Attacks! LeMay, unflatteringly
served by slow-motion reduxes of newsreel footage that make his
eye-rolling and throat-swallowing look positively reptilian, took
McNamara’s statistics and concluded that fire-bombing Tokyo
was necessary, in the process killing thousands of civilians.
A man of strictly military temperament, he serves as McNamara’s
foil, always keeping the goal of defending the US without any
ethical compunctions whatsoever. McNamara, still haunted by his
policy decisions, invokes T.S. Eliot to describe his moral
confusion. (LeMay, incidentally, was the same demented gentlemen
who, as George Wallace’s vice-presidential candidate
in 1968, announced: “We seem to have a phobia about nuclear
weapons. I think most military men think it’s just another
weapon in the arsenal… I think there are many times when
it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons.”)

Because the film only has one interview subject, Morris’s
voice is heard more often than usual asking questions, straining
slightly to be heard from behind the camera. McNamara, nearly
always poised, is articulate at all times and doesn’t hide
beyond obvious obfuscations. Morris is, primarily, an artist and
not an activist (which explains problems like these the more knowledgeable have
with his film). What’s clear, though, is that McNamara is
involved in quite a bit of self-flagellation. His opponents would
argue that that’s not enough for the man viewed by many
as the primary architect of the Vietnam debacle, but the film
makes a compelling case that, at the very least, McNamara deserves
a re-evaluation as a man of good intent, if poor thinking.